That there are environmental fascists is true. That there are reasonable environmentalists is also true.

That there are stupid conservation ideas is true. But there are good ones, too.

As Ayn Rand said, when it was about cleaning up the dirty rivers and air, it was one thing. When part of it got to be about crushing capitalism, it became something else. I'm smart enough to make my own choices.

I don't think fluorescent bulbs should be forced down our throats by the government. But I buy them, where using them makes some sense. Hell, I even know where to recycle them.

I use paper bags at the store because there will always be trees, but not always oil, and it's a no-hassle choice. Same for recycling plastic, glass, and paper, which my town makes easy with nice separate bins. Again, it's not any more hassle to dump a bottle in the recycler than it is to dump it in the trash.

Nuclear power makes sense. We need huge amounts of energy for economic prosperity. France has made it work successfully for years.

Solar power makes sense, too. It fills some niches, and the more it's used, the cheaper it gets, and the more it will be used.

I'm an engineer. I find ways to do more with less appealing to my sense of order. I like hybrid cars as a concept. Electric cars will be better. Oil has too many critical uses in our society to simply burn it, and this would be true if CO2 was not an issue at all. Nobody will cheer louder than I will when solar panels become cheap enough to start routinely installing them on new homes.

I don't like the idea of government forcing these issues, jamming things into certain courses in their usual ham-handed manner. Government, as a rule, is not very smart, and tends to make decisions based on limited knowledge, and driven by politics over everything else. If ethanol has a problem right now, it's because it's driven by politics. Politicians are not generally bright enough to know you can't legislate physics, or the laws of economics.

A great deal of the marvels of our computer and networking industry is the result of things that happened before the government could figure out how to get in front of the parade. Things that develop on their own like that tend to work. Imagine if the government had designed the internet from the top down. Or issued regulations on things like minimum memory requirements for computers.

So if Sanyo wants to dance around in a green outfit, it's cool by me. Maybe they're just getting on a fad, like all the restaurants tossing transfats out the window without laws forcing them to. That's the way things are supposed to happen in a free society.